What is Digg?183 Comments
- bsoric, on 10/12/2007, -1/+40I don't think using a proxy to visit a website counts as "hacking".
- theguy10, on 10/12/2007, -3/+25Yeah well when I worked at CTU LA, I had to hack the NSA by parsing the sub-net, reconfiguring the sprinkler system, and then enhancing the video from the traffic cameras to get the password written on the notebook laying on the dash of a '94 Crown Vic cop car that showed up to shut off the sprinklers.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+23he was showing them how to use a ***** proxy. he didn't 'hack' anything.
it's more a case of pointing out something blindingly obvious. - will-rom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+20in high school you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent
- InternetUser, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20Heh when I was at school I wrote a program to mimick the look of the Novell logon screen and collect passwords [it would display 'invalid password' or something and proceed to load the real logon screen]. Got the admin's account too ;)
I then gave it to someone else who put it on ALL of the machines and set the probability of my program running on each boot to 90%. He and his friends were caught and expelled. Whoops! - starbirix, on 10/12/2007, -3/+21:-(
I got sorta the same treatment at my highschool back in the day, except I got the punishment along with the demand I tell them how to fix it.
I had been disabling Novell by inserting a ; into the line in system.ini that invokes it by resetting the computer and interrupting boot to take me to a prompt where I could run the "edit" program... ah, the days of Win95. - Xiol, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17I also work in a school as a system administrator.
All this kid was doing was showing them how to use proxies on the Internet to bypass the local filter.
We use Dansguardian, so a few well placed regular expressions in the bannedregexpurllist file sorts these out.
.*proxy.* - pretty much knocks anything out with "proxy" in the URL. Whitelist sites that have proxy in there for no reason. Stops searches for proxies too - can't search for them, can't find them.
You could also put the words "proxy", and "bypass filter" in your bannedphraselist file and that'll stop the others that don't have proxy in their URL. We get pretty much 99.9% coverage of all proxies this way, and the 2 sites that were flagged by this and not proxies were added to the whitelists.
That school needs their techs talking to, not the students. - Apreche, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15When I was in high school 7 years ago I TRIED to tell the IT guys how I beat the system. They were in the room with me, and I showed them. They didn't care. Maybe if every school had a real technology professor and a real IT staff we wouldn't have these problems
- sirmalloc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13I'd have to say my funniest highschool 'hack' was back in the days of WinNuke, Actually, it wasn't even a hack, just a DoS attack. But the way it was setup and the end result was amusing. I believe I was around 15 at the time. One of the computer labs I had class in had about 25 computers, all running Windows 95, and all completely exposed with public IP addresses. I made a map of every machine in the room with it's corresponding IP address.
On my home linux box (slackware if I remember correctly), I setup a cron job to dial into my ISP during the time I was in class, and then run a script to update a dynamic dns entry with one of the services like DynDNS. I had Apache running on the box hosting a simple CGI app I made. The app outputted a map of the classroom in HTML, consisting of a single checkbox for each computer, laid out to look exactly like their arrangement in the room. At the bottom of the page was a submit button, aptly titled 'Crash'. When the form was submitted, any computer that was checked off on the page would have a WinNuke sent to it's public IP address, in sequential order based on it's position in the room.
This naturally led to all kinds of fun while I was actually in class. I could pull up the page and checkerboard the classroom by selecting every other computer, and watch as the bsod's went down the line and across the room. I could follow the teacher around the room, and bsod any computer she happened to sit down in front of. When she finally called in the tech for the county, the bsods would happen immediately after he sat down to look at any computer in the room. If I really wanted to get out of whatever stupid Windows 95 lesson they had for the day, I'd just slam the entire room a couple times and eventually they would give up for the day. Their final solution was to disconnect every computer from the network, and it remained that way for the remainder of the semester.
Now, the class wouldn't have warranted this except for the fact that the lesson plans were having us sit down and read through the original user manual for Windows 95 and follow along on the computer. Start. Programs. Accessories. Calculator. Start. Programs. Accessories. Notepad. Start. Programs. Accessories. *bsod* ;) - templest, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12And I use my own SSL-Enabled CGIProxy with the word "Proxy" removed from anywhere in the file to avoid this. My school uses Dansguardian too. ;-)
- anonatron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Wow, it is amazing what passes for "hacking" these days. It seems like it has become a buzz word thrown around to make an act seem either "cooler" (I hacked that box... by using a proxy) or more severe (he circumvented our security and hacked our boxes... by using a proxy).
- adml_shake, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12"Heh when I was at school I wrote a program to mimick the look of the Novell logon screen and collect passwords [it would display 'invalid password' or something and proceed to load the real logon screen]. Got the admin's account too ;)"
Lol, I used to pull that trick too. They admin knew who was doing all that but he couldn't ever prove it was my friends or I. To this day he still doesn't know how we always seemed to get his login info. - adml_shake, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10"Yeah well when I worked at CTU LA, I had to hack the NSA by parsing the sub-net, reconfiguring the sprinkler system, and then enhancing the video from the traffic cameras to get the password written on the notebook laying on the dash of a '94 Crown Vic cop car that showed up to shut off the sprinklers."
Lol, really....ever hack any Gibsons while you were at it? Or come accross Special Agent Richard Gill? - MiamiGuy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Incredible how kids these days are getting so smart with computers. I'm in my 20's but back when I was in high school nobody even cared for using the internet much to even try doing this. I admire the youth, not because they are doing things wrongfully, but because they are using their wits to do so.
- t3hX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Hang on? Did i read your comment right? You're proud of being a MCSE?
- nferrier, on 10/12/2007, -6/+16You younguns don't know your born.
When I was at school we had an Acorn/ECONET. In order to hack it I took down the central fileserver and used a disc editor to read the password file (which was convieniantly stored at a fixed location on the disc).
I never got offered this deal because I never got caught. - zatrix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I got the exact same treatment, except I simply changed the Admin password by booting with http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ .... good 'ole days
- t3hX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9... and me.
Anyway, also, it was a bit stupid to put his NAME on the cards. Reminds me of the Simpsons when Bart gets busted with the hot air balloon / big butt Skinner thing, and he gets caught with photographs and blueprints for it in his pocket... - quadvods, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9"They'll give him a break if he lets the school's tech people know how he beat the system."
Why don't they look at one of the cards he made?
If they can't find one, he can tell them to **** off for lack of evidence. - harryd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8My ISP has a similar rule. The user agreement states that you are, in fact, allowed to hack into their systems. You'll be rewarded 6 months free service if you can provide them with a) proof of your hacking and b) full disclosure on the methods used. To my knowledge, no-one has ever tried anything of the sort.
- forgiste, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I actually installed nph-proxy on my home computer (along side apache) and I would connect to it by 230-135-26-72-bwd.pgrb.com because my ip and marvngrad.com were both blocked at school. Anyway, people found out about it and started using it carelessly, and I got my transfer revoked and had to go to a local school.
I still use my proxy sometimes.. - Alphateam, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11I work at a school. While yes it sucks this happens it should not be rewarded. I mean more power too him for figuring it out, but handing cards out to others is BAD. Here there are thousands of students that need the network to work. If some idiot gets a step by step account and doesn't know what they are doing...they can really screw stuff up. There would be a good change the original kid would be harmless, just trying to get it because he can. But letting others in who might not have the knowledge or ethics to be responcable is inexcusable and should be punished.
- Xiol, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I work in a school, and I've spoke to techies from other schools...
Quite frankly I think the team I'm in is probably one of the most competent teams in our district. We know what we're doing, we have everything locked down and follow best practicies for keeping things running...
Problem is the pay is *****. I mean, REALLY *****.
I manage 8 servers and about 300 desktops at 4 remote sites on my own, and then another 450 machines and 6 servers with a team of 3. I can install, configure and manage all versions of Windows including server versions and all that come with them (AD, etc) and am also very proficiant in Linux (managing about 4 Linux proxy servers myself since the other techs don't know Linux). I get paid less than GBP13,000 a year.
I'm sure not every school tech is incompetent, they probably just don't care because they're not getting paid enough to care. - templest, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Kinda the same thing happened to me. The dolts had mapped the server's drives to all the clients on the network; they had just disabled access to them through DOS/Explorer. So it was just a matter of brute-forcing all letters in the alphabet to see which ones were active. The entire school ran on Windows 2000 at the time, so I figured creating a desktop shortcut to "C:WINNTExplorer.exe" would be interesting enough. I killed the local instance of Explorer and ran the server's one, and *bam*... had access to all administrative databases/files/programs, not to mention the admin's private proxy port that had no web-filtering. ;-)
The *only* reason I got caught, was because I was too stupid to one day (when my account had a corrupt roaming profile) ask the admin for help. He fixed it and tested it out on his box, and when the desktop loaded, he noticed an icon called... you guessed it, "Shortcut to Explorer.exe", he double-clicked it and just said,
"Cute."
Since I didn't do any damage to anything, they went easy on me and just gave cafeteria duty for a month. :-(
Although in retrospect, I should have taken the one week suspension instead.
Curses and drat. Oh well.
Digg for bringing back ol' memories. :-) - Boyblundr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6What a lucky kid. He doesn't deserve to get away with it. While I hate my school website lockout as much as the next guy, don't try to work around it. It leads to nothing but trouble, because you get accused of using it to visit inappropriate websites (i.e porn). I speak from experience.
I mean seriously. My school blocks wikipedia... that's total BS. - Agret, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6"They'll give him a break if he lets the school's tech people know how he beat the system."
I've got an awesome idea! How about they read the cards he was handing out?! - toomuchgreentea, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Silly ... they don't care because they don't want to care. They're filtering only to satisfy the school board and the politicians. Why would they want to make their job more difficult?
- databyss, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Back in my old high school computer hacking days, they used policy editor to lock out stuff.
I got around it by embedded the exe's I wanted into a WordPad document and using that to launch them.
Ran policy editor through that and set the various group permissions to what i felt was appropriate... basically student and teachers get full access and admins get limited.
Now adays the admins are better prepared and more knowledgeable... and so have the tools to circumvent them.
In one of my classes, the computers were less restricted and me and a buddy installed shareware Doom and Hexen and played on the lan. - Xiol, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The less you know the more you get paid.
- Zedtech, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Schools are corrupt. I think we've all had our fill of being branded of some kind of unethical "computer hacker" by our school teachers and administrators. When I was in school, I was suspended for merely using a remote desktop session on my PC at home to bypass the web filters. They suspended me with the claim that my actions had lead to/were with the intention of spreading a virus on the network (or some idiotic thing like that). And they had also claimed the last user to use a remote session (which was a friend of mine who was using SSH to access his Slackware Machine) had in fact caused the spread of a virus on the network. Talk about incompetent.
School administration has little idea about computers and when students show their superiority they brand you and try to revoke your computer access. Despite asking how you did it, they are all corrupt, and I imagine in this case it's going to be the same thing: Once they have the information and are able to fix the problem, then what happens to the kid?
He's not going to be handed a cake walk. He's going to get punished despite the "choice", just to what severity will based on his actions. - templest, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Like I'd tell you. :-D
Especially since I'm posting this from school right now, hehe.
EDIT: Hah, I just realized the picture of myself in the top-left corner of this post. Not cool. - spyk3d, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9@nferrier: What a waste of time... all you had to do to hack a network of BBC computers, was change your Station Number (held in RAM - duh!) to someone else's and you had full access to whatever they had access to.
If I remember correctly, ?&D22=[stationNo] did the trick.
It's the equivalent today of manually changing your IP address to someone else's and getting access to everything they have. At least times have moved on a little since then! - templest, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Mm... what was the name of the ".ini" file? Uh... You know, so I can ask our school admin to take a look and make sure he hasn't committed the same error. :-)
EDIT: And where it was. :P - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4My schools tech password was teck. I couldn't stop laughing when I, "guessed the password," because they are really anal about making us have secure passwords.
- drw2583, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5You knew the "principle", huh? You obviously didn't pay much attention in class...
- vincentb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4We did the same with Novell messaging. The whole school board received the messages, these times were great.
- threemagic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Unfortunately, most schools don't have the financial means to pay for "real" IT help
- Xiol, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yeah but then the extra money I'm earning would have to go on the cost of living down there.
Besides, you southerners don't do gravy with fish and chips! - CJHtxGeek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Heh, my friend found a workaround for local and network admin passwords, and they offered him a summer job, no joke.
- modusop, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6+digg for everyone's great stories
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I offered to show my "IT" guy at my school the exploits. He didnt want me to. So I did the next day and released the whole markbook for every student into everyones profile.
- bolo311, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Don't you have to be a admin to create an administrator account? Nice try
- Jeffrey903, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4My school's security system is terrible. Normally you can only run "approved" executables, but if you rename any .exe file to iexplore.exe (or any other common .exe windows file), it will run without a problem. Great for running portable apps (portable firefox, etc). I also just use a VNC to access my home computer and get around internet blocks that way.
- Prod1gy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4A few weeks ago I got an admin password at my school. Kinda funny though, I discovered it on accident snooping around the network drives, using shortcuts to get around the "Access denied". It was just conviently stored in a .ini with:
user=adminame
password=whateverthepasswordwas - rhawk301, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Back in my day, it was fun using a simple shell script which would be run as my logoff program. This would emulate the pyramid unix login screen and collect password. Escape sequences, Control-C would be trapped. It was pretty effective and fun if run in the lab often.
@theguy10 Or you could somehow tap into someones computer using the power grid through the subnet. Yeah, that would happen. Or hack into the secure NSA computer using the subnet as a back door? Guys lets find some better tech speak over there, 24 is going down in tech flames. - toomuchgreentea, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The admin in my case had to be the most stupid. He put the log-in scripts of W2k (when it first came out) into individual profiles without locking it down. Anyone can make changes to mount and unmount anything they want. On top of that, he only commented out the portions that ordinary users should not execute, instead of deleted them. So even if you don't know jack about W2k, you'll still be able to make changes just by copy and paste.
He was lucky. No one bothered to exploit and no one got hurt, but many were running simulators and routers on drives that were not supposed to be mounted. Can you believe it was only changed after a full year of insecurity? - adml_shake, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3They jerkins and Kleenex proxy?
- zaguar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Bit risking using Remote Desktop buddy. Ever heard of Cain and Abel, the application that makes it trivial to run a MITM attack on a RD session. Risky move, very risky.
- demigod186, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I ran into this same issue in college. For database classes they had a Linux server running oracle that could be accessed from home and from school. They used a hardware firewall at the gateway to make sure only the oracle port could be accessed. But from the school you could use secure shell to connect using the local server address(not the Internet one), and use the oracle/oracle account they created when installing Oracle.
I showed this to them, I showed them how to make oracle a non login account, and they just didn't care.
it wasn't an admin account,but that didn't really matter because they didn't apply update patches. I've used nessus to evaluate the school servers before(from school), and most of them had 10+ unpatched exploits. The oracle server had the most getroot exploits.
As far as I can tell they have broken one of the major network perimeter security tenets. Never let public servers have access to anything but other public servers. In other words, you should have your gateway/firewall, then your DMZ public servers, and another firewall to prevent any servers in the DMZ from connecting internal computers.
With the DMZ/Bastion approach, the internal computers would access the server through the Internet gateway, and not through a local sub-net.
They reinstalled to upgrade, and didn't leave the oracle/oracle account with a default password this time, but still...
I also told them about how Novell left temporary accounts on the computers when they were not shut down properly, and anyone with admin, or using lsadump2, could go around and collect the hashes for processing at home.
They said they were aware of the problem but there was no apparent solution, and most kids weren't smart enough to try something like that.
oh well... - truebullfan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This sounds like the movie "Catch me if you can" where they offer him a job
-
Show 51 - 100 of 182 discussions
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is